54 ONWARD & UP WARD WITH THE AR T 5 I N whatever coarse surround- Ings American female poetry is destined to decay, its initial triumphs occurred in the parlor. "The Female Poets of America," published in 1848 under the editorship of Rufus \Vilmot Griswold, gave the American feminine diapason its :first opportunity to sound and swell. Scattered notes in women's voices had been heard for some time previously, for if poetesses did not actu- ally arrive on America's shores with Columbus and the Norsemen, they ap- peared shortly after the white race had laid claim to the regions impinging on Plymouth Rock. After two cen- turies their names were legion and their music so insistent that their antholo- gist confessed himself practically over- whelmed by its resonance. American literature in general had hardly had time, in the words of H. James, to show its head above ground before it was culled and displayed in Griswold's anthologies. Griswold's ear- ly career-as a sailor, a Baptist preach- er, and an itinerant printer-had been obscure. Later, in his rôle of Poe's mal- icious literary executor, he was to meet with opprobrium that hurried him to his grave. But as an anthologist he ex- celled and prospered. The eighteen-forties in America, as elsewhere, was a decade when spots of culture went down better than the full cup. The embalming in- fluence of the Parlor had begun to creep over the civilized world. The 'triumphant bour- geoisie did not fly out into the open to ex- hibit their new pres- tige. They dug them- sel ves in, wrapped their windows in draperies, and began to decorate their centre tables. Books, long used to up- ended dignity, cheek by jowl with their fellows .on library shelves, rap- idly went into the bibe- lot class. They were laid out flat, for display; their binding of pressed leather or of watered \ silk gleamed, at eve- ning, under the cozy lamplight, and litera- ture in scrappy form filled their gilt-edged pages. Beauties of Lit- erature and Specimens ';S" Ir .. "' \ v;' , '", \ ì\ \ '\ \ j::. d, .. (;.. ". (:! rOE TE55E5 IN THE P AR.LOR. .of the Poets soon bred the Keepsakes, the Literary Souvenirs, the Forget-Me- Nots, and annuals in general. \Vomen's hands had a great deal to do with this use of reading matter as interior decoration, and women not only disposed literary gems, bound in suitable form, about their homes; they laid down, from time to time, the feath- er duster, the Berlin woolwork, and the crying child, and, taking up the pen, wrote verses and prose. \Vhereas women's verse, in England, had been more or less limited to the upper classes, with an occasional sur- prising note added by a hearty Scots- woman, like Joanna Baillie; a shame- less hussy, like Aphra Behn; or a pious provincial, like Felicia Hemans, in America poetry had risen from the throats of women of all classes. Anne Bradstreet, whose husband was an emi- nent member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, published a book of poems in 1650, won the praise of Cotton Mather, an d was describe d as "the Tenth Muse, lately sprung up in Amer- ica." Mercy \Varren, in Plymouth, wrote. tragedies and verses on the Bos- tün Tea Party. Not long thereafter, Elizabeth Graeme Ferguson, surround- ed, in Philadelphia (it is Griswold who quotes), by "the most polite and c...":. elegant society in this country he- fore the Revolution," warded off the humors of a naturally feeble consti- tution by writing poetry and transcrib- ing the whole Bible, "to impress its con- tents more deeply on her memory." Nor was poetic talent restricted to women of the white race. Phillis \Vheatley, "daughter of the murky Senegal," had the good fortune, when exposed for sale in the Boston slave market in 1 761, to be knocked down to "the wife of a respectable Boston merchant." She learned to read and write, soon could construe Horace with ease, and it was no time before she was in London, with her poems published under the patron- age of the Countess of Huntingdon. " T HE FEMALE POETS OF AMER- ICA" contained selections from the works of ninety-four women, both quick and dead. As is usually the case in collections of this nature, songstresses alive in the year 1848 and able to buy and cherish copies of the volume far outnumbered singers already departed from earthly scenes. At least seventy- :fi ve of the poetesses were Griswold's contemporaries. Some of these ladies had received notice in a previous col- lection, wherein the sexes had been mingled ("The Poets and Poetry of America," 1842). Others had been praised or deplored by P oe, in a series )11[02) L1]@@ .?::7 GAaDnlEI1. QeA "1 don't care how you get 1t, but by God, men, don't come back here without a picture of Mrs. S. Stanwood Menken'"